Your story’s setting determines the where, when, why, and how of your characters’ lives. It exists to encompass every detail into a realistic and consistent cohesion, holding your story in place even as characters and events try their best to upend it.

We’re not just talking maps anymore—there’s a ton of details related to setting that are not map-centric, but that are generally required for your story to see the light of the publisher’s eye. Today I’d like to discuss a handful of them, with the goal being to help you to see your worldbuilding in a yet more complete and beautiful complexity.

What Is Story Setting?

To continue the building metaphor, story setting is your framework, the house into which all the other pieces coexist. It’s built on top of your story’s foundation—the characters—because without a good foundation, a house falls, and without a good character, so does the story.

But just as a foundation is worthless without the structure it’s designed for resting on it, so too a character is worthless without an adequate setting in which to live and act. The setting must enhance the characters’ actions and development if it is to be a proper framework.

Some key aspects of story setting include:

• Backstory – Everything that came ‘before’ that made the world or characters what or who they are today. This one can be a rabbit hole, so stay focused!
• Location – The place, including physical location, climate, current weather, and ambient mood.
• Cultural Norms – The typical expectations for dress, behavior, general appearance, and opportunity, among many other things.
• Time Period – The when of a story, providing a general expectation to your readers regarding what sort of events, tools, or behaviors they might see.
• Technology – Involves transportation, communication, and the general skill-sets as related to the culture’s technological advancement and needs.
• Character Perspective – Refers to who is telling the story and from what distance, which alters what portions of the setting readers most experience.
• Story Genre – The ‘type’ of your story, most useful for garnering consistent readership, but also for ensuring your work stays consistent within itself.

So, let’s take a look at some ways you can use these to build your setting.

Backstory

Backstory informs and reminds you why things must be as they are. It also ensures that your characters have a common starting point, no matter where the story might launch them later.

You can be as creative as you like with it, digging as deep as you wish into your imagination, so long as you remember one important truth: You can only move in one direction at a time. Explore your backstory, but do so with the understanding that the story you intend to tell will not move forward until you’re done.

You’ll likely only publish a fraction of what you create. After all, it’s the historical text of your world, not the story itself. If you try to incorporate it ‘as is’, or even edited but still whole (called info-dumping), it will stop all action, interrupt readers’ thought processes, and wind up killing the story it’s meant to support.

So what do you do with it? These are a few key ideas:

• Spread it out and shorten it. The longer your histories ramble, the more readers you’ll lose. Find ways to build the necessary information into your story’s action in quick bits, and be willing to let the rest of your brilliant construction remain unknown.
• Use flashbacks, but sparingly. If you truly can’t shorten something vital, turn it into an immediate scene. Take your readers to that time and place and let the characters act in full view. But not too often—back and forth lurching may kill the story as quickly as info-dumps.
• Remember that readers can think. A sobbing child clings to a stuffed toy. A woman refuses to look in a mirror. A man sits, head in hands, at a bus stop. We know and feel their unhappiness as we see them; we don’t need multiple paragraphs to list out the historical logic behind it.
• Use prologues wisely. As what may be the first taste a reader gets of your writing, the prologue sets the tone for everything. Be creative, passionate, and in-the-moment. Don’t ever use prologue as a history lesson. The odds are not in your favor.
• Stay true to real life. People don’t remind each other of shared events or the names of mutually known people unless there are grossly inaccurate recollections. So don’t let your characters get away with that just so you can share some backstory.
• Start each chapter with action. The slow, descriptive lead-in works in classical literature because readers approach those books with a different mindset. Modern stories require quicker, more pivotal action that grabs and propels the reader from chapter to chapter.
• There are always exceptions. But if you make them your norm you’re less likely to succeed. So, however you go about sharing your backstory, always check—am I hamming my creative muscles to the readers, or do my characters really need to know?

Location

Often when you create new locations, you’ll also need to establish certain rules. This is most true for genres that take a story setting outside of real life, but it does apply to general storytelling as well. You can establish your rules overtly by telling or covertly by showing:

Good Telling:

• Newcomer Introduction: A higher-up or older person tells the newbie or young person the basic rules and expectations. This is best kept short and sweet, with the immediately relevant parts shared in the moment, and other portions coming at later times.
• Written Notification: The character reads the necessary portion of a notice ‘out loud’. Alternatively, you write the specific rules up on the page in quotation marks or a different format to stand out. Think Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.
• Inserted Poetry: A useful method of imparting a quick cultural idea to readers that they can then place over the story to understand the ambient feel.

Good Showing:

• Accidental Breaking: If a rule you’ve designed is starkly different from the norm, bring a new character into the space and have them do something to accidentally break it. This could result in hilarity or crisis.
• Character Emotions: This aids in the application of ambient mood, but always the showing must be made through how a character speaks or reacts. Avoid as much as possible the labeling of the emotions, and instead find ways to make the readers feel it.
• Descriptive Action: Characters interact with the various pieces of a location as they move through it. For example, if you want to draw attention to a rubber ball you’ll use later, have the character pick it up, toy with it, and set it back down as they converse.

Cultural Norms

These norms glue Location (see above) and Time Period (see below) together in a reactive, story-deepening manner, and your work doesn’t have to be historical or realistic for culture to be present. Culture will impact your story setting in multiple ways, including:

• Era: A lengthy time period stamped with specific behaviors, dress, or actions.
• Location: Usually geographical and often joined by shared environment, climate, resource availability, language, and/or history.
• Subculture: A smaller slice of culture that may combine both era and location, in which a divergence from the previously established norm occurs.
• Milieu: The social context of a character, including employment, social groups, public feelings, and general social crises.
• Familial: Family and closest friends will usually impact characters’ actions and reactions far more than the general culture around them.
• Anti-Culture: The intentional avoidance of what would be considered normal culture within an area or era, but which, ironically, tends to produce its own subculture instead.
• Changeability: Star Wars is about 46 years old. Google is 25, and Instagram isn’t even 15. Think about it.

Our personal cultures influence our writing and worldbuilding in subtle ways. From the language we write in to the varied behaviors of our characters, to the physical and emotional settings, our cultures will impact how our characters live, interact, and are perceived by our readers. It’s important to be aware of this. Another word for this is bias (not the same as prejudice).

BE CAREFUL. Cultural norms differ significantly and are highly personal to the people within them. If your story draws from or involves specific real cultures, it is vital to respect that, and to make an effort to learn and correctly portray their distinct flavors, rhythms, and purpose.

Time Period

The when of story setting controls at least as much of a character’s life as the environment does, and tells readers what sort of props, homes, or other physical pieces we might see or expect to see as a larger part of the story. Time period may be expressed in a number of overarching ways:

• Backdrop vs. Integral: Backdrop settings don’t require precise time periods. The stories could take place at any point with only minor adjustments. In integral settings, the time periods make the stories, and so are intricately involved.
• Past, Present, and Future: Your story’s time period may not be static, nor the action consecutive. It might be brief or a saga spanning decades, or may hold flashbacks or even a multiverse. It’s up to you to ensure the reader understands and follows all this.
• Historical Fiction: Research the era, culture, technologies, and all the rest to prevent glaring timeline errors…unless, of course, that discrepancy is a part of your plot!
• Ambient Feeling: Certain periods lend themselves better to certain feelings, and these can be useful scaffolds for constructing this vital portion of your settings, even if your stories are not at all historical.

Don’t be afraid to play with your time period, adding or subtracting from it at will, especially if you find yourself stuck. You might surprise yourself with the ideas you come up with! Star Wars Shakespeare, anyone?

Technology

Technology is the word we use to refer to things that make life easier. A hoe or shovel are as much a technology as a computer, smart watch, or space ship. There are five major things to consider as you’re establishing your world’s technology:

• Props: Focus on items most important to your story’s furtherance, those things your characters interact with that ground the physical and emotional aspects (Think Rosebud). This relates primarily to things characters hold or wear, but could include furniture or larger appliances.
• Transportation: Do people walk or use a moving sidewalk? Are there horses or spaceships (or both)? Transportation relates to how people get around, and is particularly important if your story involves a journey or quest.
• Communication: How quickly and easily people communicate across distances will affect your storyline. Language also plays a factor—are there translators available, and if so what kind? How formal or informal will communication be in different situations?
• Food: Acquiring food requires technology of one kind or another. Food needs work in a tandem cycle with technology: More food and tech = higher population = more need for food and tech. How food is prepared and the cuisine that’s offered will also depend on this cycle.

Character Perspective

In general, the closer a reader is to the narrator—the more ‘in their head’ the writing style—the more active sensory input a reader is likely to receive. But, that input will be skewed to that character’s bias only. If you want a more eclectic experience, you’ll have to back away or switch characters. Many excellent books do this.

Here’s a list of some things specific characters can notice to help build your settings:

• Smells: Good or bad, localized or general. Smells are incredible memory-joggers for character and reader alike.
• Tastes: Many books incorporate food or mealtimes. Tastes are familiar, and are closely associated with smells.
• Sights: What they naturally notice vs. what they don’t notice. Mystery books require a protagonist with a keen eye and curiosity.
• Sounds: This goes beyond spoken communication. Ambient sounds like birds or garbage trucks help to fill and further define the surrounding space.
• Touches: Warm or cold, calm or breezy, moving or stationary. A character’s physical comfort level is strongly impacted by these aspects of settings.

Story Genre

Genre is a construct designed to catalog expectations. How you create your settings and ultimately your stories will usually need to fall into one of those categories if you expect to gain a reliable readership. The primary genres that influence setting are:

• Science Fiction: This is one of the two that require quite a bit more worldbuilding than most. It may range into more technical spheres as well, depending on how hard you want to go. It is always set either in the future or in an alternate universe.
• Fantasy: This is the other that requires a great deal of worldbuilding, especially in terms of maps and setting rules. But you have a lot more leverage to create at random than most other genres allow.
• Realistic: This one is true to life, usually set in the modern day or something akin to it. But remember, ‘modern’ can look very different depending on what part of the world your characters inhabit.
• Historic: This includes stories that are entirely fictional but set in a specific past, as well as stories based on (but not identical to) real events. Worldbuilding in this genre often requires a great deal more research than others.

Within these genre-specific settings are the many other types, including mystery, romance, horror, and speculative. Every genre you choose to write in will affect your setting on some level.

In Summary

Story setting is more than just the physical stuff. It’s the mood and culture, period and genre, and many other things all wrapped into one. But it’s worth parsing out to find the sticky spots in your work that need more detail. As with anything, the more time you spend, the better your results.

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Looking for more to read? Check these out from the MockingOwl contributors and authors.
Traveling Back in Time with Outlander
Using Landscape for Inspiration
Just Keep Writing
Worldbuilding 101: An Introduction